Search like a pro with the new advanced search experience Edited

The new experience has been made available to all Confluence Cloud customers. After monitoring the usage of the old experience, we will be removing the Switch to the old experience link in the next couple of days.

We have plan to enable support for operators such as AND, OR, and NOT in search query in the new experience in the next couple of weeks. In the interim, you can use the following link to go to the old experience in case you need:

https://yoursite’sname.atlassian.net/wiki/dosearchsite.action

Please continue to post your questions and feedback here. Thank you.

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Hi everyone,

It’s Elaine again, your Marie Kondo for finding information in Confluence. We know that locating the materials you need can be a challenge – especially if your organization lives and breathes Confluence pages. Our goal is to help you get what you need fast, so you can search and go!

To that end, we’ve revamped advanced search to give power searchers a better experience. Advanced search uses an improved search ranking algorithm that boosts search success by 22%. We’ve also made it faster to load the page after you click on a search result. If you aspire to be a power searcher, the new experience is easy and intuitive – a quick and simple way to get your feet wet. Now everyone can search like a pro.

Advanced search helps you find anything and everything in Confluence so you can be more productive. We’re not just talking pages and spaces, but also blogs, comments, and attachments.

We’ve given you many ways to jog your memory, so you can find what you’re looking for in seconds. The new experience has all the filtering power you know and love, but now filters are easier to discover and use. Narrow down your searches with comprehensive search filters like:

Last modified: search for content last updated in a particular timeframe

Label: search for content that contain particular labels

Only search for page titles

You’ll know that you’ve found what you’re looking for right away when you see rich information in search results. You can spend more time focusing on what matters when you don’t have to visit pages that aren’t relevant. Search results also show you the space where the page lives and when it was last updated. With advanced search, you’ll know when you’re hot on the trail to finding what you need.

All told, we’ve streamlined the experience to make your search nimbler. Please let us know if we’ve managed to do that. Our team is listening.

P.S. - We’re working on a simpler and more powerful quick search experience that we hope you love. We’ll share more when it’s ready, so hang tight.

We use Confluence Cloud for our software System Administration Guides so being able to search for exact text is important. Currently I have to export a portion of the Confluence pages as a PDF so that our users can at least do an exact search in the PDF files that I attach to one of our pages. This is laborious and not exactly the best look for an IT company like ourselves to be doing!

@David_Gregory , thank you for your feedback. This is on our plan for later iterations. We understand it's important for many to be able to search within the entire breadcrumb including ancestor and parent titles besides the page title itself.

Rather than offering it as a filter, we are considering incorporating ancestor and parent titles in our general search indexing and search results ranking. We'll keep you posted.

As an update on this, Atlassian has since provided a (largely unpublished) way of searching in a page tree.

Use "ancestorIds:[page_id]" in CQL

@Elaine H. , @Balazs_Nagy , @Shrey I have requested and not received a reply for the full list of CQL queries available and how to use them (see my message on Nov. 21 below). I have searched for this to no avail. Please provide a link for what is available and how to use.

@Elaine H. Right I need to select type == Answer for the search to look into Answers. That is a good start but I think "Question and Answers" should be combined (or Answer should be implicit in the Question type.)

Without any malice, Atlassian needs to understand how your decisions affect your customers behaviours. We uninstalled the Questions module yesterday and decided to go with StackOverflow for teams. I really wanted "Questions for Confluence" to work but there are way too many problems with it including searching. My own team pushed back on me and after trialing StackOverflow it was overwhelmingly clear which system best met our needs. When I uninstalled the questions module I left feedback that I would be willing to spend a whole day with one of your team members (I live near Sydney) to discuss all the issues we came across. Will see if Atlassian takes me up on my offer.

Thanks Ben. I am the Product Manager for Confluence Cloud ecosystem and would love to spend a few mins learning about your experience with Questions for Confluence. Is it possible to have a video meeting next week for the same?

@Elaine H. are you thinking of putting in some kind of search builder? I think in the immediate term just allowing a user to override the filter and use any valid CQL search query would be fine. It is useful for doing things not otherwise supported in Cloud's out of the box features, like looking for pages that don't have a label assigned.

Thank you for everyone's input. In the near term, we want to bring the commonly used operators back to parity with what had in the old experience. Based on what we've heard, it'd be AND, OR, NOT, wildcard, exact word match for keywords and labels.

There's currently no plan for a more sophisticated search builder. As I mentioned in another reply, besides getting closer to feature parity on operators, we will focus on improving search results relevancy without heavy reliance on operators.

Thank you for taking the time to voice your concern. I hear you that the new experience hasn't provided the full set of advanced search capabilities that you need.

We don't have support for operators in search query yet in the new experience. Currently the new advanced search doesn't interpret operators such as AND as operators. This is why you observed a much larger set of research results.

We have plan to support operators e.g. AND and OR in search query in the new experience. For the time being, please go to the old experience (https://yoursite’sname.atlassian.net/wiki/dosearchsite.action) so that you can continue to use this feature. If you have any particular thoughts on what operators are most important to you, we'd like to hear about them.

Meanwhile, we have other initiatives to improve search results relevancy without heavy reliance on operators.

We just confirmed our plan to bring back support for basic search query operators including AND, OR, and NOT in the new search experience. We plan to release it in the next couple of weeks. This is a known limitation that we have planned to address shortly after completing the full rollout.

We'll also look into the issue you mentioned that searching for "partitioned table" yielded noisy results, as part of our initiative to improve search results relevancy.

"we will focus on improving search results relevancy without heavy reliance on operators"

Hopefully you aren't just relying on tweaking search ranking algorithms to achieve this. The software industry serving the enterprise is shifting to natural language and graph-based search solution.

Is this what you have in mind?

If not, filters and operators remain an important tool. But I completely agree that the UX needs to encourage novice and new users to stop them from giving up and walking away from Confluence. But don't forget you power users either.

In terms of parity - what is described in the help should be possible, shouldn't it?

Based on what we've seen and the new UI and your comments, we are going only get back:

Exact phrase search

OR search

AND search

NOT search

Title search

Searching for labels

Single character and Multiple characters (Wildcards)

How will you solve for the following or are you saying these won't be supported?

Excluded term search

Grouping search

Searching for macros

Proximity searches

Fuzzy search

Combined search

What would be great is also to have an option to enter a pure CQL search query.

In all openness, we're making some major transformations to our search stack beyond this user experience update. The end goal is to make your search more successful and faster. On our way there, we try to strike a balance between advancing our stack for the greater good and ensuring customer needs can be met continuously. We'd love community's input to help us keep the right balance.

Hi @Robert_Lauriston I'm an engineer on search experience. These changes were planned to address the speed and look&feel of search, and as @Elaine H. mentioned there is active work on changing our search infrastructure. I would be happy to learn what's missing for your and get your input, so we can prioritize what's more important for our customers.

CQL as in operators in you can include in the advanced search query: we plan to bring them closer to parity with old search. We're considering AND, OR, NOT, wildcard, exact word match for keywords and labels.

CQL as in APIs you can use to build extended capabilities on Confluence: it will continue to work as is.

We use a lot of machines named 'dev-username' or the like. Pretty much annoying that when needing to search for them, dev and username matches as returned as results, that is, all "dev" matches are returned, or all username - in the hundreds. Totally useless.

Typical operators that would work in search engines since the invention of search don't work.

looks like the problem is that by default searching for "All Content" does not include questions. I have to manually go to advance search and switch to "Questions". Searching for "Questions" also doesn't search comments unless I explicitly switch to "Comments" in search type.

The old advance can search all 3 (wiki, questions, comments) at the same time and it's badly needed